Dungeons, Dragons, & Dinosaurs
58:32 Share

This episode is brought to you by Soros, the dino trick-taking puzzle game featuring beautiful mahjong-style tiles, paleo art-covered play mats, and custom dice and tokens. Get yours for just $40 at Kickstarter now.

Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 541st episode... We have two new compsignated dinosaurs. Or compsignated like dinosaurs. Or are they even compsignated? We'll get into that. Because of that recent debate about maybe they're just babies. Yes. We also have an interview with Dr. Michael O'Sullivan about dinosaurs in Dungeons & Dragons. Yes.

which is very fun. Also Pathfinder. And we have a dinosaur of the day, Panoplosaurus, which is an ankylosaur, an armored dinosaur. Oh, I know. We also have a fun fact, which is that AI is helping us to identify dinosaur bones and might soon help to reconstruct whole animals from a few bones or reconstruct dinosaur family trees without needing troublesome matrices. Yeah.

I've been talking about this for a while, and I am excited that it's starting to get closer to a reality. More of the fun fact. But before we get into all that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. And this week we have four new patrons to thank. They are Samantha and Kyle, Amber, Becky Soros, and Lily.

And then rounding out our shoutouts, we've got Ranger Chris from Dino for Hire, Thane Spino Lover, Destiny, Riker Tattoo, Dennis, and Wouter. Amazing. Thank you so much for being a Dino and all and being part of our community. We hope you're enjoying the perks. And if you want to get in on some of the perks, like getting a shoutout, for example, you can go to patreon.com slash inodino.

We're also working on spotlighting our dino-idols. So later in this episode, we'll be talking about a short story that dino-idol Tumorex wrote. Very cool. So if you'd like to join, patreon.com slash inodino. Yes. Now jumping into the news, like I said, there's two new compsignated-like dinosaurs. The names are Sinoceropteryx linguanensis. So it's a new species because Sinoceropteryx has been around for a while. And then we've got...

This was published in National Science Review by Ruiqiu and others, and it's open access if you want to read it. Now, both of these consignated-like dinosaurs lived in the early Cretaceous in what's now western Liaoning, China, in the Yixian Formation.

Like I said, Sinosauropteryx has been around for a while. It was actually the second compsignathid named and the first dinosaur known to have feathers. So it's a really important one. And now we've got 10 compsignathid genera and species, if you count compsignathids as compsignathids. Which most people still do. Mm-hmm.

Given that they're talking about them in this paper, they do too? Well, no, they mention Andrea Cow's paper. So traditionally, consignasids were considered to be early diverging salurosaurids that were small, often less than a meter long or about three feet.

And they got details and things like the neural spines. But the authors in this paper, they mention Andrea Cow's paper, which we talked about, but as bonus content. So you got to be a patron to listen to that. That paper is about how compsignathids may just be juveniles of other species. Hence why the authors of this paper say it's compsignathid-like. Oh, okay. So it's getting a little bit, not necessarily acceptance, but...

attention, not just being brushed off as a fringe theory or hypothesis. Yeah, and maybe we'll see this change more over time. So these two dinosaurs are named on two specimens that were found 20 years ago. I'll start with Sinoceropteryx linguanensis. That one's almost four feet or about 1.2 meters long, and it's the largest known Sinoceropteryx specimen. The holotype's an almost complete skeleton, it's just missing its feet and some tailbones.

It's probably a juvenile, so going with that consignated paper, that's based on separations in the bones. It had a low, long upper jawbone. Its rostrum, or its beak, was about half the length of its skull. And that species name, Linguanensis, is a Chinese county-level city where the holotype was found.

It's interesting that it could be a juvenile and you were talking about how that's one of the first feathered dinosaurs. It'd be interesting if that was just dino fuzz on a little chick and then as it grew up, it lost the feathers. That would be, ooh, that would be very interesting. It would totally change my view of what Cytoceropteryx is. Yes. Well, it might not even be valid anymore. In that case, it could just be the juvenile of some other named dinosaur. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Okay. Sorry. I think this is still a debate. Yeah.

So then we've got Haudenosaura sinensis. That holotype's also an almost complete skeleton. It's missing its feet and some tail bones. And it may also be a juvenile based on having unfused bones and a relatively large skull. And that one's preserved on a slab. That individual's about 3.3 feet or one meter long. It's similar in size to the juvenile Sinosauropteryx. Its skull is about four inches or a little over 10 centimeters long.

It walked on two legs, it had a long tail and short arms, as well as a deep jaw and skull, and it was covered in feathers.

That genus name, Huadan, means, quote, the birthday of a great person or a great institution commemorating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the 95th anniversary of the founding of the Paleontological Society of China and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, end quote. Huadan means that entire thing.

It's the birthday. Okay. And it commemorates all of those things. Oh, I see. Okay. Like that's a very, a lot of detail in one word. It's just referencing a lot of things. So based on their phylogenetic analysis, the authors didn't find them to be juvenile specimens of an existing taxa, even though both of these specimens are probably juveniles. There was an interesting comment by Christoph Hendricks saying,

who on this paper, who called out that the two new species described were based on juvenile specimens and said that it was quote unquote regrettable that they didn't have stronger arguments against them being immature individuals of already known species. They mentioned that the Jeholbiota has Tyrannosauroids like Dylong, Sinotyrannus, and Eutyrannosaur, which are phylogenetically close to Compsognathids or closely related species.

And it could be that the two new species are juvenile Tyrannosauroids instead, and maybe the way they got food just changed as they grew up. We need to find more fossils to know for sure, especially fossils that show the growth stages. Yeah, very true.

But back to the original paper, I brought up the food because another interesting piece in the author's description is they talk about three different feeding or hunting strategies among the small theropods that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now northeast China. So starting with Sinosauropteryx, Sinosauropteryx had probably a small bite force based on its

It's long, slender skull and lower jaws. And it had short arms, so it couldn't tear prey to pieces with just its arms. It also had relatively slender legs, so it probably went after lizards and insects. And in fact, a lizard was found in the stomach of one Sinosauropteryx. And so maybe it used its feathers to camouflage. And maybe it was diurnal. It would hide under direct sun in an open area for the camouflaging.

Then, Haudanosaurus had some skull features similar to Tyrannosauroids, which suggests convergent evolution, unless you go by that comment and maybe it just is a Tyrannosauroid. Anyway, that may mean that it had a strong bite force, though it did have weak pre-maxillary teeth. That's in the front of the snout, so it couldn't do that puncture-pole style of feeding. Maybe yet. Maybe, yeah. There were small, disarticulated mammal bones found in its stomach, so it probably ate prey much smaller than itself. Yeah.

and it probably caught small prey in its mouth and it would kill it by biting it with those maxillary teeth and then swallow the prey whole.

And Haudenosaurs may have been nocturnal because Mesozoic mammals were nocturnal and acid on that mammal that was found in its gut shows that it hadn't been in the stomach for too long. So it was probably active during the same time of day. That's an interesting way to look at it. Yeah. Unless it just dug it up in the daytime or something. Well, there is always that. Or found a dead one. But it is fun to think about. Yeah. And then last, we've got Sinocaleopteryx. That's a carnivorous salurosaurian.

That's at least about almost eight feet or 2.4 meters long. It was found in a different area from these other two dinosaurs and it was named at another time, but they lived around the same time.

It walked on two legs. It had a long tail and a long head. It had a slender upper jaw and slim teeth, so it probably had a weak bite force. And it had short, slender arms, but its legs were stronger than Sinosauctorix, so it could control and kill prey with its legs. And stomach contents show that it could hunt relatively large prey, like dromaeosaurids and birds. Wow. Hunting a dromaeosaurid when it's only about eight feet long is pretty impressive. Yeah. So that shows these three different hunting styles.

And then the question is, how did they get such different feeding styles and diverse theropods? And that could be from the formation of small isolated rift basins during the destruction of the North China Kraton. That's a continental crustal block or a piece of the continent. And then that destruction led to separate ecosystems. Yeah. Or just regular niche partitioning. Yeah.

That is cool. I like that they threw in this whole story about what the three of them were eating, even though it sounds like we have really good evidence for what one of them was eating, having that mammal in its guts, but the other two, not quite as much. Oh, well, the other two, no, the other two, there are specimens that show gut contents. Oh, there were gut contents for all three. Yeah. Wow. That's impressive. The Sinoceratops was a different specimen has been found with a lizard. Okay. So we're drawing from that. Pretty cool.

Well, as promised, we're going to do a quick spotlight on Dino it all tune Rex, a shout out to our patron who shared with us a really cool short story that they wrote. And we'll have a link so you can read it for yourself. It's on deviant art.

It's called A Meal Fit for a King. And I love stories told from a dinosaur's point of view. We talk about that a fair amount on this show. You've written quite a few. That's true. So I'm just going to give like a synopsis of the story. There's some spoilers. If you want to read it for yourself, skip this segment, come back to it later. Or pause it. Or pause it. Yeah.

In this short story, we're in the late Cretaceous in the Hell Creek Formation. That means Tyrannosaurus Rex, maybe you guessed from the title, a meal fit for a king. Poor T-Rex, though, is very hungry and is not having much luck getting food because first he finds an Ankylosaurus, but that Anky's just too healthy. It'd be way too difficult to flip onto its back, and that's the only chance that T-Rex has of besting it, so he moves on.

Then he sees Dakota Raptor with a juvenile Ornithomimus, but that raptor had the good sense to move up into a tree and out of the Rex's reach. So next he follows an injured Edmontosaurus to water with high hopes, but that poor dino gets dragged into the water by a Mosasaurus. So poor Tyrannosaurus gets frustrated and hangry. And then finally we end up getting to the ultimate Hell Creek battle, Tyrannosaurus versus Triceratops.

What happens is there's two Triceratops bulls fighting, an older and younger male, and the older male takes a beating, which makes that an easier fight for T-Rex later. The Triceratops still manages to wound the T-Rex, but ultimately, spoilers here, the T-Rex gets its meal fit for a king. Yeah, Triceratops would be. Yes, especially if it's wounded and bleeding already. I like that progression too, because we often talk about, you know,

These big adult dinosaurs wouldn't necessarily fight each other. And it's not always what would win in a fight T-Rex versus name your dinosaur could be triceratops. And a lot of times we say like, why would it fight another adult? It would probably look for a weak or injured one or something like that. But.

In the case that you're starving and it's like, this is your only option, all bets are off. Yes. So yeah, the story, there's so many great descriptions. It's full of action. These scenes are backed by science, like you were talking about, the different interactions between the animals. T-Rex also has a great sense of smell, so it's easy for it to find its potential prey. One quick thing, the consensus today is that Dakota Raptor is probably a chimera.

With some of the fossils that we thought were Dakota Raptor, the thinking is now they belong to turtles. Yeah, but the other fossils could still be Dakota Raptor. True. Or maybe they did belong to something that's already been named. Yeah. The jury's still a little out on that. Yeah, we're still waiting for the papers on that one. But overall, this was a fun and quick read. So check it out if you're looking for some dinosaur fiction. And in a moment, we'll get into our interview with Michael. But first, we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break.

This episode is brought to you by Soros, the dino trick-taking puzzle game. We mentioned this before, I was so excited to find Soros on Kickstarter, and we got to play the game over the weekend, and it was so much fun! I do need to mention, the round that I won, I had so many sauropods, so that must be my lucky soup. Thanks, sauropods. Although, not to betray my sauropods, but I do like the raptor art the best.

It's probably the feathers. Just something about the feathers. Anyway, Soros, the game, it is straightforward to play. The rules are easy to follow. There is strategy involved too, especially the more familiar you get with the game, I feel like you could get really deep on the strategy.

I can totally see this becoming a family favorite game once our kids are a little bit older. Though right now, they do love looking at those Mahjong tiles. They're mesmerizing for both babies and toddlers. And adults, let's be honest. I like the Mahjong tiles too. It's a very replayable game. Your strategy, it changes depending on your playmat, which...

By the way, it features some beautiful artwork as well. So get your copy at Kickstarter by searching for Soros. It's spelled S-A-U-R-O-S. And the campaign ends so soon. So make sure you order yours now and then let us know if you got a copy. Let us know what you think when you play. Again, that is Soros, S-A-U-R-O-S on Kickstarter.

No offense, but your brain is a terrible place to keep your big idea. It belongs in the world, but you know that already. You have a calling, a voice that says, this is what I'm meant to do. Create the website your big idea deserves with Wix. Make it your own with top-to-bottom customization, AI to help realize your vision, and built-in business tools to turn your daydream into your dream job. Wix supports every stage of the business journey except one.

Your decision to begin. Ready? Go to Wix.com. And now on to our interview with Dr. Michael O'Sullivan. But as a quick reminder, we have an extended version of this interview for our patrons. So for a patron, you may want to go check that out. But without further ado, on to our interview.

We are joined this week by Dr. Michael O'Sullivan, who's an Irish-based paleontologist and writer and researcher for Paleo Games. Paleo Games specializes in introducing realistic dinosaurs and other extinct animals into tabletop role-playing games. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. This is such an interesting aspect, I guess, of dinosaurs. I don't think we've talked about this

We find dinosaurs can pop up in many places, but it wasn't until recently, I think we thought about like the Dungeons and Dragons thing.

Yeah, yeah.

I was always kind of interested in the game, but I never really... You know, you live in Ireland. Ireland's not really populated. We've got like five guys and a sheep, let's be honest. So it was a situation where...

Nathan had been playing for a good long while and it was his kind of baby at first. And then my girlfriend got me into D&D. I started playing for maybe like a month before Nathan contacted me to get involved in this. So it was always D&D. It was always D&D. We've been asked about other TTRPGs before. We're reaching out into the Pathfinder sphere at the moment. So we've got a Pathfinder version of our first book, Dr. Drolan, that just came out.

And, you know, we've been asked about other systems at the moment, but like adapting these between the systems can vary so wildly. Like you've no idea. And they need to be very robust, right? Because any little missing piece is going to totally break it or people will take advantage of it and re-enact it.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. If it is something else when people find the holes in the system and just decide to go running with it. So they, I think how long does it take to do the path? I think it took about a year and a half to adapt the Pathfinder version of Drolon. Wow. That took about two, two and a half years to fully write. Wow. Cause I've heard that Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons are pretty similar, but it sounds like there are enough differences to make it complicated for you. Yeah.

Well, I won't bore you with the history of TTRPGs, but Pathfinder originally started off as kind of a third-party spin-off of D&D. And it grew in popularity and it became the second biggest one. And then they decided to completely revamp a lot of the systems. So when people talk about Pathfinder now, they're talking about second edition, which had so many changes in how it's structured. And there are people who will never touch a game at D&D and are addicted to Pathfinder and vice versa. Yeah.

Of course. There's always, I mean, it's just like with science, you've got to have at least two teams fighting against each other for it. Everybody needs a team to root for. Everybody needs a team. I wish it was only two teams. So you've got Dr. Drollin's Dictionary of Dinosaurs, and then you've just wrapped up a very successful Kickstarter for Professor Primula's Portfolio of Paleontology. I like the alliteration.

I didn't come up with the name. I'm not taking credit for that. And that Kickstarter was...

so successful you were fully funded in 12 minutes and people it's wrapped up and people are still purchasing yeah no it's a bit wild I have to admit it caught me off guard the success of Dr. Drollin was already a surprise because we thought it would be a kind of a small project we might get in if we're lucky like 30 40 000 pounds in we'll make a small run of it we'll feel good about ourselves and Bob's your uncle it uh ended up bringing quite a bit more than that and

And Professor Primula would equal Dr. Drolem within a week, I think. Wow, I've thought in my head. You can imagine I was tracking like day to day to day, every single stat drop and stat rise and everything else.

But yeah, we, the pacing was completely different. Drolan had a much more low key pace and then it picked up at the end. Whereas Professor Primler basically peaked, had a bit of a drop off, stayed very steady and had a big peak at the end. Interesting. So. Well, it sounds like you already had your audience. Yeah. So you get that big peak right up front. That's nice. Yeah. No, we got lucky in that regard. Well, I say lucky, but you know, we've been told that people like the product and it's still very novel. Yeah.

Like dinosaurs in any medium are instantly a draw and bringing them into somewhere where they're not well represented or where people are disappointed in how they're represented and how they're designed. And especially nowadays bringing in the scientific aspect of dinosaurs playing, you know, yourself, I'm sure the, the way the paleo community has transitioned away from very strong, monstrous imagery of dinosaurs into the more as animals, even in the setting of D and D where I am literally DMing a campaign where I'm

I don't think any of my players are going to listen to this, so I'm safe to say this, where there's a Tyrannosaurus god stalking one of them, hoping to convert them just for the fun of it. They don't know about her yet, but even in that environment, they want to know about the animal themselves. And then you include, you know, we brought in other mechanics as well. And the artwork, like, it speaks for itself. Like, we've been incredibly, incredibly fortunate with the artists we've been able to get.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen some of the artwork. It is beautiful. And I have heard people have discussed your first book.

project in our discord and i've heard even people not associated with dinosaurs and like random friends we have outside of paleo because we have a couple of them they've told us that people that play dungeons and dragons knew about this and they're like oh yeah there's this you know there's this addition for you you can have dinosaurs and dungeons and dragons it's so cool which is just amazing to

See that it's reaching people who otherwise wouldn't be so interested in dinosaurs or in biological sciences. And yeah, I just love that. That's like the greatest part of science communication when you're reaching these new groups and getting people thinking about it. It's amazing. Was that the inspiration initially?

Yeah, well, science communication is a really big part of it. I used to do a lot when I was in uni, I went to uni in the University of Portsmouth, and I met Mark Whitten there, I helped him in the 2010 Summer Science Exhibition in London, which was we ended up building how many models?

I want to say five life-size Quetzalcoatluses in various different poses. I was never much of an artist, but I did do help with the carving and stuff like that. You could spot my one because it was a little bit lopsided. But... It's like nature. Exactly. There is no such thing as bilateral symmetry. Symmetry is a lie. But...

I got really into outreach and communication. I started doing a lot of work in schools, did presentations. After I graduated from the course, I started doing my PhD. And I...

I supplemented my income a bit with outreach as well. And even when I was just job hunting afterwards, I'm actually a school teacher at the moment, but I spent a lot of my time going to outreach, going around schools, going to do presentations and various different places. And like outreach is really important to me. And Nathan's very much the same. Nathan goes on about outreach so much. I'm surprised he hadn't written a book in it.

But, you know, we're both people who we got involved in this because we watch walking with dinosaurs or heard the talks or met the famous paleontologists. And we're all excited kids, kids and adults and everything else.

And that's how you spread this. You don't spread this by publishing an amazing paper and you're all your academic colleagues going, wow, what an interesting re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-examination of Spinosaurus. You gain people's attention by having the headlines and by also doing something that touches on the spheres of influence they're interested in.

then that's how they will get involved. It's, you know, it's the Jurassic park effect is real. People watch Jurassic park. They watch Jurassic world. And this becomes a part of their life in such a huge way. It's why I have to, this is minor tangent because some people were actually going on. It was like, should you be bringing dinosaurs into a fantasy setting?

And I would say like, why would you not? Yeah. Like give it to your ex-ability to breed fire and wings. Yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of real animals, right? Like there's cats and dogs and humans and it's not like, oh no, they're in the fantasy world. That all of which can talk. Yeah. Yeah. You can have a conversation with literally any cow you see. There is a spell to talk to literally any cow. It's not like there's like one single super academic cow you're hanging out with. No, any cow.

But it's when Jurassic World first came out, I was always very much on the side of I don't really care how accurate the Indominus Rex is. It's a movie monster and it's going to engage people in science. And we're starting to see that new wave, that new like 2015 wave of paleontologists. And I'm sure rebirth when it comes out at the

in the middle of the year will cause another wave that we'll be seeing in five, 10 years time. Yeah, it's that first initial look at dinosaurs. And sure, you look at it and you're like, I love the Jurassic Park. And even if you get super into the Jurassic Park version of dinosaurs, eventually, if you're that into the Jurassic Park version of dinosaurs, you're going to branch out a little bit and you're going to find out

from dinosaur nerds like, oh, well, maybe it wasn't quite like that. Have you heard about this other dinosaur that isn't in Jurassic Park? And yeah, it doesn't, everything doesn't need to be perfectly scientifically accurate all the time for sure. I,

I say that having written a book about D&D where we went to insane lengths to make dinosaurs as accurate as possible. I had so many sleepless nights writing that book. Yes. Yeah. And also everything we do, because we've had a couple of books come out too, and we obsess over it and lose sleep over it too. But for other people, our expectations are not as rigorous and we're not going to beat them up over little details. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So for the books, how do you decide which dinosaurs and other animals to include? Because there's so many to choose from and narrowing down is probably difficult. Yeah.

It was easier with Dr. Drolan because that was pretty much 99% dinosaurs. We've got some pterosaurs, we've got mosasaurus, we've got polycoplids, plesiosaur. We got a couple of permian animals like Garjarnia, like one or two little things like that. But it was mostly like, what dinosaurs can we pick? And when we're picking dinosaurs, what will be interesting both from a paleo perspective and a fantasy perspective?

Like we did T-Rex. We had to do T-Rex. You got it. But there's already a T-Rex in D&D. It's one of the few dinosaur stat blocks that anyone likes. Like I said, this was Nathan's baby originally. And one of the reasons this whole project came about was the dinosaurs in D&D are rubbish. Like they're just rubbish to play against. There is no way in the world a T-Rex should be able to be beaten by a party that's just started off, but they can do it. Yeah.

You go through this. So we don't want to necessarily just do Tyrannosaurus. So we did young Tyrannosaurus. And then we had, you know, you could go on a special tier in Kickstarter and you get to pick an animal to go into the book. And someone said they want to do an ancient Tyrannosaurus. So now we now have like a full growth range of Tyrannosaurus in D&D. Of three different size classes and different abilities. But for me, it's always a case of what have people heard of that they'll like and what haven't they heard of that they're going to love? Hmm.

Yeah, like you included E, which is such a fun, cool little dinosaur. Oh, I was so excited about that. All right, we've got Zool as another one in Drolon. Yeah. Which we've got in just because it's an ankylosaur named after Ghostbusters. And we themed all of its abilities after, like, Necromancy. Opening gateways that may or may not let ghosts through. But...

So it's really for the dinosaur nerds. It's the ones they expect to see in the ones they, they want to see in a really interesting way.

And for everyone else, it's like, there's so many things you've heard of, but there's so much more you haven't. There's so many dinosaurs, so many mammals. We've got mollusks in the new one that include some rather wacky ones. What we're aiming for for this is really, everyone's picking up a dinosaur book. Everyone's picking up an extinct animal book. But this is one of the few ones that is really going to have something. Almost everyone is going to find something they haven't heard of in this. Is it too soon to ask? Will there be a third one? Ah!

We have ideas. I can't spoil, but I can say if there's just the third one, I'll be surprised. We have ideas. We have ideas. We're all working on a few different things. I can't obviously, I get murdered. But yeah, we do have some very good ideas. I'm very excited about some stuff coming up. Nice.

Yeah, at the very least, you mentioned on the site that the Pathfinder version of this will come out at some point in the future. So there's at least one repurposing, I guess, or not a full new version, but a new version. I don't know how to describe it. It is a full new version, but the animals will probably be mostly the same. Yeah, so in terms of Pathfinder, it's about just changing mechanic and stats and stuff like that.

We've got a really amazing team for that. Some of the people who actually developed Pathfinder 2nd Edition are on it. So we are so lucky to have them. But originally we were hoping we'd get that as a stretch goal, but it's a big goal and it's a lot of work and it's an expensive bit of work as well. We didn't make it, so it will happen, it just won't happen as fast as

So what are some of the challenges when you're combining fantasy and science? Because you want things to be accurate and teach people, but you also still want it to be entertaining, something people look forward to reading and learning about. How do you balance the two? I would say it's a struggle, to be honest, because you really do have to be very careful. You can't lean too far one way or the other. As much as I would like to make this the leading tome on...

encyclopedia version of a dinosaur listing that is up to date and accessible to everyone. People want to experience the fancy part as much and as much as people want to experience the fancy part you can't let that trap you and make compromises on the science.

One thing we actually, I think it's a really good example is that when we did the Neanderthals, we were originally very cagey about how to do them because they're a playable race. All our other races are completely fantasy based. Like we've got Smilodon, Sauropods, the Tyrannosaur, what else? Trilobite and Ramphorhynchus. They're all complete, like fancy cultures, fancy behaviors, fancy clothes, fancy everything. How long they live.

Whereas Neanderthals are a real species that existed and had some very bad press. And also, you know, humans have a very bad habit of taking other cultures and reinventing them for their own amusement. Let's put it that way and try to be as nice as possible. So trying to balance the fantasy side of doing a playable race where you have to give a culture, you have to give something for people to work with. Because most people, they know cavemen. They do not know anything about Neanderthals.

With the fact that these have a real science, a real culture, real behaviors, societies, everything else. It was really hard. We messed it up the first time, to be honest. I think...

We gave an original version. We showed it to our Discord. The Discord said, like, listen, you were too safe with this. You played it too safe. We ended up doubling the size of the section. What we did was we did a really long science section, a really detailed science section. And then we had a section saying we will now transition into a constructed society that is invented by us. But everything here and here that we can base on the science, we will inform by the science section.

And it was, I can't spoil what's in there yet, but it's as much as we, like we've got some wild fancy stuff in there, but some of the stuff that got published about Neanderthals in the fifties and sixties was wild. There was a very interesting, actually, this wasn't even the fifties and sixties. I think it was much more recent where someone published about how, oh yes, we have strong evidence that Neanderthals worshiped eagles and bears because they're found in caves with bears and

And they were found with a lot of feathers in a lot of their jewelry and items. Strong evidence. Which, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can make perhaps, perhaps they worship the eagles and bears. Perhaps they just thought that these are pretty feathers and this guy's in my house. Yeah.

Maybe they weren't even in the house at the exact same time. It's a little hard to distinguish that sometimes. So it's challenging to find the balance. It's easier at times with some of the more wacky stuff. We've got like some NPCs, some original characters and stuff in the book this time around. And they're just like fun. They've got a little bit of science in there, but not too much.

But if you're talking about actually balancing the real information with avoiding the fantasy element, like I was saying about the behavior, it's very hard to come up with interesting behavior that's not repetitive. That's not just repeating something you said five times already. That's also still grounded in the real science. Yeah.

And then, like I said, we have the magical element, the magical rule set, and we still want our magical rule set to be, except for like the really wild stuff. Like we've got Kentrosaurus that for some reason can decide itself as a horse because why not? It's got kind of a horse face.

Exactly. But we've got like the big owl thing. It's funny, but it's also it's grounded in something that's very tied to the culture of this animal. I had a student today out of nowhere saying I watched Big Al over Easter. It was really sad. And then I made it worse by telling them like, oh, yeah, Big Al was a sub adult female, had some children at least once in her life or was about to lay eggs.

And yeah, even more injuries than you think. They were so mad at me by the end of the day. Bambi's mom, basically, is what you're saying. Yeah, yeah.

But it is difficult, but it's incredibly fun. Yeah. Yeah, I like that you start with the science. You're like, here's everything we know. Or not everything we know, because that would fill an entire book. But here's a summary of what we know. And then moving on to the fun part. What's all the fun part, Garrett? Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, it's a blast. Do you have a favorite animal that you've worked on? Centrosaurus is actually a very big soft spot for me because it's the first one I got involved with before I even knew I was going to be on the book. I was just giving a few ideas and a few thoughts.

And then Centrosaurus is a very big soft spot for me. The ancient Tyrannosaurus as well, because I really enjoyed writing the section, her science section, because for some of the boss creatures, we didn't go full deep into the sciences, but we ended up discussing some predictions and studies about size.

in tyrannosaurus and size limits and age limits as well and how yeah we all say sue is the oldest tyrannosaur we know but then we ended up with what was it wasn't mapusaurus it was something else oh one of the carcarodontosaurus oh marax yeah and they estimated the age of that individual would be 40 to 50 years old and the idea you're going to find the oldest tyrannosaur that ever lived and

You know, we... Sue is old by the virtue of very few animals live that long anyway. But doesn't mean anything to you about was Sue middle-aged? Was she ancient? Was she a she? Was she Sue? Was she Lou? So I really, really enjoyed the ancient Tyrannosaurus and...

And yeah, those two are kind of my special babies. I have to admit that the few things that are coming in in the new one that were cut from the original book, I'm super excited to see. Like Gigantospinosaurus is on our list. I spent ages working that for the first book. We had to cut it for space and time and everything else. We got it into this one. We're really, really excited to see that in there. But yeah, I'd say the Centrosaurus and Tyrannosaurus just because of circumstance. Yeah. Yeah. Centrosaurus is cool just from a...

or science communication perspective because it's like Triceratops. It's the one with three horns and it's got the two long eye horns and the one short nose horn. And then it's like Centrosaurus is the opposite. Yeah.

Yeah, but like back when we were using the long frill short frill ceratopsia in the vine, I'll never forget going through a book and going like, wow, what a clear divide. Here's triceratops. These rules don't apply. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. It breaks all its rules. Yeah, there are no rules. You know, you get into taxonomy and you realize, wow, we use some really bad

bad systems of family and species identification sometimes because length of frill is not a good family sometimes it takes a few tries Sabrina occasionally has to remind me like not even all ceratopsids have frills period some of them are just like oh man that's right I can't even say that

It's the beak, the rostrum. They do have a beak. So far, until we find the beakless one, then that doesn't even work. So it sounds like

You weren't initially working on the book. You were giving ideas. And then was it like, your ideas are so good. Come write this. Nathan describes it as he was sitting in a chair working and I shoved him out of it. There's quite a few memes of that going around back when Drollin was going. I was, you know, Nathan and I were in uni together. We've known each other for years. And he came to me with this idea, you know, and we were just like, listen, would you mind giving me a bit of an eye over it?

And I was looking at Centrosaurus. And one of the things they said was, wouldn't it be funny if the magic ability was it could make a monoclonus to distract people? And yeah, we went with that. And I did that with a few other creatures. And then he asked me, would I like to write a couple of small pieces for the dinosaurs? Just bump up the science a bit.

And those small pieces kept on getting bigger and bigger because I'm a terrible editor. I cannot self edit. And then it was kind of like, I mean, you need to stop writing because if you keep on writing, I've got to make you a co-author in this.

Because I was just going and going, and I was just like, I could just be a co-author. What's the problem with that? I don't mind. And yeah, we ended up, in my opinion, doing something really special. And then he said, well, I mean, we're going to do a sequel. And I was like, yeah, we're doing a sequel. I'm already started writing it. Yeah.

But yeah, it was like... It's one of those moments... I don't often say you have those standout wow moments of your life, but that was... I've wanted to write a book, a proper book, not research paper or anything like that, for my entire life. And I've wanted to write science, I've wanted to write fantasy, and I...

You know, you get to that stage where you go like, it'll probably never happen. But if you'd have told me a couple of years ago on a Discord call, I was going to be getting ready to knuckle down for my second book in a few years. I wouldn't have believed you, but I'm very happy to say it came true. That's great. So you originally, you were studying pterosaurs. What was your focus there?

Uh, taxonomy of middle Jurassic pterosaurs. So specifically focusing on stuff from the Stonefield slate. Well, it's informally known as Stonefield slate. It's a great Oolite group. It's more accurate. So there, in case you don't know, a couple of hundred years ago, there was a lot of work collecting from slate quarries in England and a lot of material was being found in isolation. It was being given generalistic names and not really being examined and thrown into a box. And that's how we ended up with Ramphicephalus or Ramphicephalus, however you want to say with it.

which is a really old taxa from the late 1800s. And about four or 500 individual specimens were thrown into it and then thrown into a box and no one looked at them for about a hundred years. And then a few people looked and said like, I could do something with those and they never did. And then a few people did a little bit. And then, uh,

2011, I was coming out of my undergrad and I went to the guy in charge of paleo in Portsmouth at the time, David Martill, and just said, like, I want to do a PhD. And he said, get out of my office. And then I came back and said, I still want to do a PhD. And I was going down to shops one day and he rang me and said, you still want to do a PhD? Just like, yeah, yeah. But...

I basically went through the whole collection and tried as best I could to identify as many of the things as possible. A lot of it is non-identifiable or like not certainly not to a guy just in the middle of his PhD career.

With oh so few years of experience. I've thought about going back to it, if I'm completely honest, and re-examining it in light of a few small little bits of research that have come out since. But I ended up identifying five morphotypes. Yeah, five, I think. There's at least three fairly large pterosaurs in there. Including...

monofenestratins like eucanopterids and stuff like that, they are in there. There's some material in there. I'm desperate to find the time to actually re-look at and actually delve into. I couldn't at the time for conflict of interest reasons, but would really want to now.

Ended up naming a new taxon out of it based off of some jaw material called Clobidon, which we got in Drollin because I said so. The advantage of writing your own book. And yeah, it's sort of been my area of expertise, a lot of taxonomy. I'm working on a few papers at the moment, which I really need to get to because it's one of those things where you've been working on them for months because you got distracted by a million other jobs. Yeah.

Like writing a book? Like writing a book. But yeah, ended up as a supervisor for a PhD student in Scotland named Natalia, who's quite well known these days, the author of the arc.

and all that stuff which was tied up you can see the connection to middle jurassic pterosaurs and everything else and yeah i always always kept my toe on it ended up working teaching just because a job's a job and paleontology is a competitive field there isn't always there's only so many lecturing positions yeah what do you teach uh biology so biology and science so they are so sick of me talking about dinosaurs are they so i assume that's like high school aged

Yeah, yeah. So dinosaurs aren't in the cool phase. If you were teaching younger kids, then maybe they'd be like, oh, dinosaurs, tell us more. I get more from the other teachers, to be honest. They get more excited. Nice. But yeah, pterosaurs are the worst.

weird field for me to go into because I was never a big pterosaur guy growing up. Like I knew Pteranodon and I knew Quetzalcoatlus and Ramphorhynchus and I didn't really have much interest beyond that. And then I just sort of fell into it. And then I found them, I find them utterly fascinating. They're such strange animals.

It does seem to be the required route in paleontology. You have your interest, and then there's a way better opportunity, and then that becomes your interest. Basically, basically. There's a lot of transference of affection. For those of us not as familiar with pterosaurs as, say, dinosaurs, how big is a large one?

I have a rough size of Quetzalcoatlus, but... Yeah, like a good-sized pterosaur in the middle Jurassic would be like two meters, three meters across. They're much smaller. They're nowhere near like the sizes you're getting in the Cretaceous, where four or five meters is not unusual. Still very big.

But, you know, there's quite a lot of animals in that size range. Whereas at the moment anyway, there's some slight suggestions of larger. But I think the biggest we've got strong dated for now would be about three meters, three and a half. So if you imagine like a very big herring gull, you're in the right range. And if anyone's been on the beach, herring guns are not small birds.

They are quite large animals. Try and protect your lunch from one, and you'll see how small they are. Now imagine one with teeth. I am convinced that gulls are going to re-inherit the Earth when we drive ourselves to extinction. Well, the dudes think it's mine. Wonderful. But yeah.

They're crazy animals. Yes. Don't mess with them.

So for our listeners, where's the best place, probably online, for them to learn or get updates on Paleo Games? Where they can sign up and learn about your next project? So we've got our website, www.paleogames.com. It's the UK spelling of paleo, so it's P-A-L-A-E-O. We've also got the Kickstarter. It's finished now, but we're still taking late pledges. So if you just go on Professor Primula's Kickstarter, literally Google it.

There are a surprising number of Professor Primulas, but there's not that many. You've got the best SEO.

And yeah, anyone ever feels like giving us a shout, send us an email on paleogames at gmail.com. We're always happy to hear from people. Keep an eye on the website. We've got a few other bits and bobs on there, like some miniatures and stuff like that you can get and some maps and some fun little stuff and a few art prints as well. I think we still got some of the Mark Whitten art prints up there. But yeah, those are kind of main things. You can like, we're on like all the social medias as well. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was really fun to talk about everything you've been up to. Thank you for having me. I've loved it.

Thank you so much, Michael. That was a lot of fun. And, you know, once our kids are a little bit older, I think I could get into D&D. Oh, that would be so fun. I never even considered that we could play games that complicated with our kids. Yeah, they have to be older and sleeping better. But right now, one of them can just about put together a six-piece puzzle on her own, and the other one would just try to drool all over everything. We're not there yet. It's going to be a while. Someday, though. I think we can do it. Yeah.

We'll get into our dinosaur of the day in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. And now onto our dinosaur of the day, Panaplasaurus, which was a request from PaleoMike716 via our Patreon and Discord. So thanks. As we mentioned at the beginning of the show, it's an ankylosaur. It lived in the late Cretaceous in what is now Alberta, Canada, found in the Dinosaur Park Formation. It lived about 76 to 75 million years ago. I would say it looked somewhat like ankylosaurus, but no tail club.

It walked on all fours. Its body was low to the ground. It was covered in armor, but it didn't have any shoulder spikes and it had a long tail. Not that ankylosaurus has shoulder spikes, just this one didn't. It was estimated to weigh about 3,500 pounds or 1,600 kilograms and be about 16 feet or five meters long.

It had a broad triangular skull. The skull was longer than it was wide. It had small orbits or eyes that were far from the snout and the snout was squared. And it had a completely fused shoulder blade as well as robust arms. The arms and legs were about the same length. And of course, his body was covered in armor. He got plates, osteoderms, scutes, although there were no large spikes on its body.

It did have bony plates and lumpy armor on the skull. Lumpy. Yeah, including large osteoderms on the sides and on the jaws and small scutes within the nostrils. So much armor. The holotype had an armor plate that covers the cheek. There's also a narrow scute across the entire back of the skull. And then it had three bands of neck armor, three rows of them. The first band of armor on the neck had three pairs of plates.

It also had small armor in between the large armor and smaller round bones under the chin and under the body. The holotype has over 200 scutes. It also had a complex nasal passage with two complete 360-degree loops.

Now, in a previous episode, we compared the nasal passages of Panoplasaurus to a French horn, which is not as complex as, say, Euloplocephalus, which is more like a maze. I was thinking it's like one of those curly-hue straws when you said two 360 loops. Oh, yeah, that too. And those nasal passages helped it save energy. It's possible the nasal passages or sinuses helped warm the air it breathed in and then made it more moist.

There's a 2018 study that found Panoplosaurus had a relatively weak bite force, so it likely ate softer plants. But also its skull and jaw just made it an efficient eater. One study reported on gastroliths found with a specimen of Panoplosaurus murus, but there's no mention of it in the field notes or description, so there may not actually be associated gastroliths. Hmm.

The fossils of Panaplasaurus were first found in 1917. Charles M. Sternberg found a complete skull and a lot of a skeleton in 1917. That includes most of the neck bones, some back bones, armor, lots of the arm, including three fingers, part of the hips, part of the foot, and of course, hundreds of osteoderms. Lawrence Lamb named it in 1919, and the genus name Panaplasaurus means well-armored lizard.

Originally, it was considered to be a stegosaur, but now it's considered to be a nodosaurid. Doesn't have that club tail. For a while, Edmontonia and Panaplasaurus were considered to be the same, but now they're known to be their own genera. Kenneth Carpenter separated them in 1990. Sometimes some fossils thought to be Panaplasaurus are now considered to be Edmontonia, which means in the past, we thought that Panaplasaurus made it all the way to what's now Alberta, New Mexico, and Texas.

But anyway, Panaplosaurus did live in an area with channels and rivers. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include Hadrosaurs like Lambiosaurus, Ceratopsids like Centrosaurus, the Tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus, as well as Dromaeosaurus and Ornithomimus. And other animals that lived around the same time and place include fish, amphibians, small mammals, crocodiles, and pterosaurs.

It's a good one. Even if it's a little bit difficult to say. Panoplosaurus. Panoplosaurus. Yeah, say that 10 times fast. I cannot. I don't even have to try to know that. And our fun fact of the day is that AI is helping us identify dinosaur bones and might soon help to reconstruct whole animals from just a few bones.

Mm-hmm.

They do look pretty similar. Something that spent time in the water? Yes, and they both ate sea creatures. One of the top image results, though, was for a Spinosaurus tooth, so it could lead you in the right direction. I also tried a dedicated app called Fossil Identifier, which seems to have decent reviews, and it lets you search like one or two for free.

Weirdly, the focus mostly seems to be on finding values of the fossils. And they seem very inflated. So I don't know if they're trying to sell fossils or what the deal is. It was a little bit surprising to me. Maybe that's just the focus for now. Yeah. But the app identified it as Hamatasuchus, which is a crocodiliform from Morocco. So at least it's in Morocco. We bought the tooth from a museum in Japan that identified it as a Spinosaurus tooth from Morocco. So I was like, uh-oh.

Is this actually some sort of crocodiliform and not Spinosaurus? So I looked at some detailed pictures of Hamatasuchus and it probably isn't. Hamatasuchus teeth are more stout and they have a much higher serrated ridge on them, which is not like a Spinosaurus tooth really at all. The next best guess, because it gave three potential options in the list, was Zarophysora.

And those teas seem to be pretty similar. It's a plesiosaur, specifically an elasmosaurid, which is also from the late Cretaceous of Morocco. And then I was wondering, wait, is it the coloring of the fossil that it's cluing into? And that's why the AI is saying it's from Morocco, because a lot of them do have this sort of sandy and brown color to them. But you see that in other places too, so I'm not sure.

Zarathustra teeth seem pretty similar to our small quote unquote spinosaurus tooth, which may be a little bit concerns that maybe it's not a spinosaur tooth and maybe it's a plesiosaur tooth. And

Even though I tend to trust the museum, I'm a good skeptic. So I looked into Zarafasora. What'd you find? Well, Zarafasora teeth are a little more curved and they have more noticeable flutes or vertical ridges than our Spinosaurus tooth does. But the real giveaway is that Spinosaurus teeth have ridges or carinae that run down opposite sides of the teeth where Plesiosaur teeth don't. And our teeth has those two ridges. So it is probably a Spinosaur tooth. Oh, good. Yes.

which for the record was the third and last guess of the app. Well, it got there. It did. But I think this shows one of the best ways to use AI, which is getting you started in the right direction, because you should never just repeat something you find using AI or assume that it's giving you the right answer, because it is very prone to hallucinations and other mistakes.

For example, one time we asked ChatGPT for a dinosaur fact for each day of February. Oh, yeah. And 28 of 28 were either from the wrong date or just completely made up. Yeah, we had to do our research another way. I was like, I just wasted so much time fact-checking just a bunch of random garbage.

And also for the record, I tried retaking a picture from a different angle to emphasize the carinae to see like, oh, maybe I just took it from a different difficult angle. So it couldn't see the key feature, but the result was even worse that time. Then it picked two plesiosaurs and a mosasaur. And weirdly, one of the plesiosaurs it picked was quote unquote, plesiosaurus zarathasaurus.

Which isn't a thing. I think that's just like an SEO name to put plesiosaurus in it. Because again, this is more for like selling things, it seemed like. I see. But just for fun, I also tried an AI Rock ID app, which is much more widely used. And it guessed a mosasaur tooth or a shell fossil when I took a picture of it.

So overall, none of those dedicated apps seem to be much better than Google search. So that's probably what I'll use in the future. And Google doesn't constantly bombard you with requests to pay them for a premium version to continue using the app. So that's another perk.

Back in 2018, there was an article in Paleo Bios, which was titled, quote, using machine learning to classify extant apes and interpret the dental morphology of the chimpanzee human last common ancestor, end quote. So you're using data from living apes and using the teeth to figure out the last common ancestors for chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee humans? Yes. Well, so the chimpanzee human last common ancestor. Oh, okay. Between chimpanzees and humans. Meaning the most recent animal which we both descended from. Got it. And machine learning, for the record, if you're not familiar with the term, it's just a specific type of AI. Usually it's what people are talking about these days when they say AI, but not always.

So in their model, they identified living apes where there's no question who the tooth belonged to with 92% accuracy. That was sort of a training phase and testing to make sure it worked. Not bad. That was using a 2D image. Analyzing using 3D images is obviously much more challenging for a computer.

And the data is also harder to find. But then more recently, in April of 2023, a team published Machine Learning Confirms New Records of Manoraptor and Theropods in Middle Jurassic UK Microvertebrate Faunas. That sounds familiar. It does. We cover this in episode 464. That's why.

Basically, they trained an AI model using thousands of dinosaur tooth measurements and some 3D models, and then they used AI to analyze relationships between different teeth. And they found that Maniraptorans spread across the world before Pangea split up using this technique. But the main thing I remembered was that they found that some middle Jurassic teeth were the oldest occurrences of Troodontids and Therizinosaurus in the world, and those teeth were from the U.K.,

As another aside, I couldn't remember which episode we talked about that in. So I asked ChatGPT and it gave a completely hallucinated answer. Yeah.

But it knew that we talked about it. I don't know if it actually knew or if it just made up an answer because I asked which episode did we talk about an old Therizinosaur tooth being identified using an AI and it said, the I Know Dino podcast discussed the identification of an old Therizinosaur tooth using AI in episode 476 titled, AI Identifies Therizinosaurus Tooth. That's not an episode title we've ever used. No, it was about...

So it was talking, we talked about tooth marks a little bit at it, and then it gives a link to episode 476. And if you click the link, it goes to a 404 error because the URL is completely made up too. Well, we're still early days. We are. Eventually I did find it, but it was just using a regular search through our show notes, not using any sort of AI tool.

But the real dream of AI is that it completely eliminates the need for character matrices. Basically, those are spreadsheets with hundreds of rows and columns where you check off if a bone has a particular feature, and then you run the huge matrix through a program and it spits out the most likely family tree.

Those matrices have a lot of room for interpretation. For example, how large does a bump or groove have to be to count? Is the shape of a bone from deformation or from young versus old individuals, etc., etc., etc.? There's so many things to interpret. And this should be the type of problem that AI could excel with rather than entering a bunch of characters into a matrix, just put in 3D scans of thousands or millions of bones, identify the holotypes, and let it spit out the relationships.

I could see this being a big step forward and as big of a step forward as when we switched from cladistics that used specific traits to identify families to phylogenetic analyses using these matrices. And we have a listener named JP that's working on basically exactly that. He trained an AI model to reconstruct incomplete dinosaur skeletons. So far, it uses 2D images because, again, that is the simpler place to start.

And there are no manually coded matrices involved. As a side effect, it can find similarities between bones that may show evolutionary relationships, like the work on dinosaur teeth. Interesting. Those results can be refined or overruled by experts reviewing the relationships, which is obviously important in these cases. And there are a lot of potential benefits to having AI comparing bones.

But for the foreseeable future, I don't think there's any risk to it taking any jobs from paleontologists because even 92% accuracy needs a fair amount of error checking. I'm not sure exactly what the percentage error rate is on this model, but JP is looking to switch from 2D to 3D inputs for his model. So if you have access to and are willing to share 3D dinosaur bone scans, reach out to JP and JP's email is in our show notes.

Awesome. Yay, paleontology in the future. Yeah, I can't wait because the matrices, if you ever look at them, it's just such a mess and there's a lot of errors in them too. So it would be great to get away from those.

Well, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned on our bi-weekly schedule. Our next episode is going to be all about Allosaurus. But if you want more dinosaur goodness before then, check out our bonus content in our Patreon. And you can join to listen to that at patreon.com slash I Know Dino. Thanks again. And until next time.